A Lifetime Spent Looking

In 1973, I was a college student looking for an art elective. The young Irish woman I was dating suggested photography. She had taken it in high school and told me it was “a lot of fun.”

I took the course….Then I took every photography course the college offered.

I married the girl in 1975. Five decades later, she is still giving me good advice.

That chance beginning became a lifetime spent exploring how light, place, memory, and time can transform the ordinary into something worth looking at again.

I studied Fine Art and Photography at the State University of New York and earned my master’s degree at Saint Lawrence University. For more than 30 years, I taught photography and art, eventually serving as Chairman of Art Education, while also maintaining a professional photography practice. At the college level, I taught disciplines ranging from drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture to traditional photography, computer art, and digital photography.

Teaching across so many forms of art changed the way I approached my own work. Photography, in particular, became less about simply recording what was in front of the camera and more about discovering what an image might become.

Places Remember

Ireland has been a recurring subject throughout my work. My family roots reach to County Wicklow, southwest of Dublin, and repeated visits have drawn me back to its landscapes, ruins, Georgian doors, forests, villages, and coastlines.

What interests me is not simply how these places look, but what they retain. An old doorway, a ruined abbey, a weathered stone wall, or a road disappearing into the Irish countryside carry the presence of people who passed that way generations ago. Landscape and memory become difficult to separate.

That same fascination follows me elsewhere—to the monumental landscapes of the American West, the forests and winters of the North Country, the streets and architecture of Europe, and subjects as intimate as a flower or a reflection on water.

The places change. The search does not.

Beyond What the Camera Sees

Some images begin with patience: waiting for weather, light, gesture, or circumstance to come together. Others begin with experimentation—with movement, unusual perspective, abstraction, or the possibilities of the digital darkroom.

While my images always begin in the real world, sometimes end up somewhere else entirely.

My surreal work grows from recognizable subjects but allows reflection, scale, repetition, movement, and color to disturb what we expect to see. A landscape can become a dream. A reflection can make it difficult to tell which world is real. An ordinary object can become mysterious simply by being removed from its familiar context.

The camera provides the beginning. The finished artwork is the interpretation.

Shadow & Light

After more than five decades, I still find the camera an extraordinary reason to look closely at the world.

Sometimes the result is a landscape recognizable as the place where I stood. Sometimes it moves toward abstraction or surrealism. Sometimes it is simply a fleeting conjunction of subject and light that existed for a moment and then disappeared.

Shadow & Light Gallery brings those different paths together. The subjects may range from Ireland to the American West, from ancient stone to flowers, forests, water, and the unexpected. What connects them is a fascination with the things we might otherwise pass without seeing—and with what an image can reveal when we stop long enough to look.

There is usually more than we see first see.